On cause prioritization, is there a more recent breakdown of how more and less engaged EAs prioritize? Like an update of this? I looked for this from the 2024 survey but could not find it easily: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sK5TDD8sCBsga5XYg/ea-survey-cause-prioritization 

Yes, this seems similar to how I feel: I think the major donor(s) have re-prioritized, but am not so sure how many people have switched from other causes to AI. I think EA is more left to the grassroots now, and the forum has probably increased in importance. As long as the major donors don't make the forum all about AI - then we have to create a new forum! But as donors change towards AI, the forum will inevitable see more AI content. Maybe some functions to "balance" the forum posts so one gets representative content across all cause areas? Much like they made it possible to separate out community posts?

A related issue I have actually encountered is something like "but you seem overqualified for this role we are hiring for". Even if previously successful people wanted to take a "less prestigious" role, they might encounter real problems in doing so. I hope the EA eco system might have some immunity to this though - as hopefully the mission alignment will be strong enough evidence of why such a person might show interest in a "lower" role.

I have never worked with fire plume models nor looked at that presentation, but have done some of the most advanced work on understanding wind conditions on the 2km-100km scale. What I know from that, probably quite similar work, is that there are so many parameters in these type of models to tweak the output. And that often, unfortunately, practice is to keep re-running models while tweaking until the output looks like the experimental results. I am not saying this happened here, I am just encouraging anyone looking into this to really pay attention to this, especially if making important decisions. If they do not explicitly and clearly say that the model results are a first-try, "no tweak" run, I would assume they have done tweaking and would consider the results not of sufficient quality to support conclusions.

What we did in the wind speed work I was involved in was to look at performance on statistically significant numbers of never-seen-before cases, really sitting on our hands and avoiding the temptation to re-run the simulations with more "realistic" model settings.

Btw Anam, with sample size exactly equal to 1 I wanted to let you know that your suggestions might have made a world of difference. Moreover, I think experimenting within safe limits with supplements might not be a bad idea. While my blood tests show I am not deficient in iron, I feel much better since exactly 1 week since starting iron supplements. Perhaps optimal iron intake is individual and/or there are energy boost gains to be had at increments some, or perhaps even all the way from the deficiency criteria all the way up to upper limits? I also include a gram of vit c per day along with my iron supplement and also try to keep this away from caffeine intake.

Highly agree with this! In fact, I hope that if a significant number of shelters is produced, that the primary effect would be to help make the case for stopping development of dangerous mirror bio research. It just happens to be that my expertise and experience lends itself more naturally to this rather grim work. I would be very happy to work on something more uplifting next - I am very open to suggestions for the next problem I can help tackle (having been a small part of bringing down the cost of wind energy dramatically).

I should probably emphasize more that the ideal outcome here is of course first that we don't pursue dangerous mirror bio research. And if that happens, that the "next-in-line" ideal outcome would be for gov'ts to create such shelters and distribute them more like Nordic countries have distributed nuclear shelters - not just for "the elites". 

This is super helpful, I have tried to reflect this better in an updated title. The shelters I am fairly certain can but built for this material cost (not including labor as in a pinch I think these could be made by a wide range of people, perhaps even by the inhabitants themselves). But it is right that cost effectiveness is much harder than simply summing up material costs - one would have to cost the total solution and also have some grasp of the reduction in x-risk, which is far beyond the scope of what I have done. I simply found a physical structure that seems quite robust.

This post could potentially be bad PR for EA (e.g. "altruists are preparing for doom")

Something else about downsides of this intervention